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Yes. Good stuff. A couple years back I had cause to look over civilian websites of pro-Zionists for the numbers of Israeli fatalities caused by Palestinian-launched rocket attacks. I very quickly began to notice the way in which numbers were given for total rockets fired, launches per year; by technological innovations made over the years eg Qassam 1 or 2; by the expansion in range covered by each generation (always given by the meter or yard, rarely by a rounded off mile or km), or by the number of Israelis *injured* but almost never by what I had always considered would be the most important number of ALL...the total fatalities those fabulously high numbers they were giving me had actually caused. I immediately began to suspect that it couldn't possibly be small as to be embarrassingly so, could they?

And yes, it didn't take me long - at least after I had made that all-important leap that began to question the Israeli version of events in the M. East their propagandists had purposefully been deceiving Westerners about for over 60 years. When I realized how the Sulzebergers (pro-Zionist Jews that have long been owners of "the paper of record" - the NYTimes) had actually taken a letter sent to the paper for publication as far back as 1948, signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and 26 other Jews - all notable intellectuals in their own right....and upon the editors realization of how extremely poorly they had assessed the terrorism used by then-Irgun leader Menachem Begin, and how they saw his upcoming trip to the USA as nothing more than an effort to deceive Americans about the real intentions of his new "Freedom Party" (the letter accused him of being a pre-Nuremberg fascist whose beliefs and actions at Deir Yassin "still resembled those used by the Italian fascist leader, Mussolini.") . All this resulted in the NYTimes burying this historic letter away on pg. 5 in the "Books" section.
Anyhow, the evidence is now overwhelming that the West has been deceived by decades of deliberate lies. That this effort is still ongoing has been shown by the details you have collected here for readers lucky enough to have arrived here.

Anyone familiar with Menachem Begin's career as an Irgun terrorist, to his formation of Herut political party advancing fascist ideals (according to Einstein, H. Arendt, and 26 other leading Jewish intellectuals), expansion of Israel's borders throughout Palestine, and other policies so extreme, so militant that Ben Gurion himself referred to him as "Hitler". Begin's skillful use of fear allowed him to rehabilitate Irgun and Lehi terrorist to he same status as the IDF, to form a coalition that became Likud, make the settlements Israeli official government policy, and basically turn Israel into everything left-liberal Jews despise. And if you look close enough you will see clear signs of Begin's own tactics and strategy having been imported for use here in America. And that this was done by a group we now know as "neocons". (which explains the extraordinarily high number of duel-Israeli citizens among them); a strategy they began implementing in earnest immediately after the collapse of the USSR and what that might mean for maintaining Israel's preferential status among Middle Eastern nations.

Just as Begin had done in Israel, so too did the neocons begin fear-mongering over Iraq, now Iran, next Syria, etc. etc. It's simply American kooks emulating a successful effort by an originally- despised fascist/terrorist kook who was able to use fears and regional instabilities as a tool to completely flip Israel from the left over to the far-right..... much as those GOP kooks over here are now asking Americans to accept their own insanity as the right way to handle fears they have of Muslims, communists, terrorists, socialism, "community organizers"[wtf ????]

Another aspect of the Iraq debacle I seldom see mentioned is the question of how all those powerful people at the Pentagon, State Dept., and all those aerospace/arms manufacturers responded to the collapse of the USSR and their ability to continue justifying their own existence now that they could no longer hold up the spectre of nuclear annihilation sitting silently submerged just 10 minutes off the New Jersey shoreline.

And to that, it appears the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite it's justification in PNAC documents going back before Bush2 had even gained office, actually goes back even further to - at least! - as early as the 1992 Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) , a classified paper sent out to defense industry CEOs and others in certain government agencies with a real need to know ahead of time the direction of US policy for the foreseeable future. And in the very first DPG to be issued by the Pentagon following the demise of the Cold War, the Pentagon had already decided there would be no "peace dividend" paid out to American taxpayers for their loyalty (and funding) over the preceding decades, but instead it was determined that defense spending would stay the same in order to now fund America's new role defending it's newly found status as the world's one and only superpower. And from what we were able to read from the DPG draft leaked to the NY Times, how they intended to go about it bears a remarkable resemblance to the "Bush Doctrine" we learned about 10 years later.

And why not? The authors of that 1992 DPG happened to be none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby.

Once that DPG was shown to the people expected to pay for this policy (which is likely the reasoning behind whoever it was that leaked it), the uproar over it's decidedly martial, not to mention unilateral tone, compelled the GOP to order a revision. But again, who did they tap this time? Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.

So it;s not a leap of any kind I believe to say that with the election of Bill Clinton and their subsequent removal from power, they simply retired to PNAC where, along with Bill Kristol and Richard Perle's media knowledge and access, they reworded the 92' DPG (or "Wolfowitz Doctrine" as it was being called) into something they hoped would be more palatable to the population at large. From there we see the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document they promoted during Clinton's tenure with limited success. So it must have seemed a signal from God himself when W Bush come knocking on the door of none other than PNAC member and co-author of that embarrassing "Wolfowitz Doctrine", Dick Cheney, asking him who a good choice would be for VP should he win the upcoming general election. He did, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was relabeled the "Bush Doctrine", and "the rest is history", as they say.

Having only just now signed up to MW, I didn't want to make my first post an "Argghhhh!"followed by yet another groan in response to Krauss' attempt to dilute Zionism's responsibility for much of the difficulty now seen in the Middle East by dangling the spectre of anti-semitism in our faces as if to say "Don't go there.... You know what happened last time, don't cha?"
I read that and immediately began to suspect that perhaps I had been mistaken about my earlier, positive evaluation of the place as an intellect-driven oasis in a desert of PC pseudo-liberalism and conservative insanity.

But I began reading responses below it, most seeming to come from people who are are apparently regulars here, and after a half-dozen or so saying things I myself could easily have penned, and with only one or two rather weak defenses of Krauss by the very bottom of the page, that initial "arghh" I'm happy to say has turned into an unreserved "I think I'm home!"

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